Struggling with myths and metaphor

Photo: Azusa Street Group Picture

Myth and metaphor are surely related; I'm just not sure how. The history of my school career was to skate by avoiding as much of the hard stuff as I could. As a consequence math is impossible and my knowledge of literature quite primitive. I've tried not to let my lack of education get in the way of my curiosity. But writing online about things I know little about can really show my ignorance. It's funny too how permanent what is put up seems to be. I know just wehre to look for evidence of my own ignorance. Ignorance one can hope is a temporary state of affairs, yet all of us will be forever ignorant of more than we know. I'm certain of which political candidates I'll vote for in the coming election. My purpose for thinking about religion and politics isn't to persuade anyone. I'm writing more as an attempt to become a little less ignorant about political matters all around me.

In the article in the LA Progressive about Sarah Palin I linked to yesterday she was attributed as saying upon Barak Obama's securing the nomination of the Democratic Party:

So Sambo beat the bitch.

I'm quite willing to accept the word of Lucille the waitress the reported has attributing the remark to Palin, but perhaps Palin never said it. What captures my attention about the quote is how charged the words “Sambo” and “bitch” are by virtue of the history of them. Any parent knows about how strange it is when their two or three-year old discovers profanity. Certain words are charged with a particular magic quite evident to children. Whether Palin is quoted properly or not the words attributed are magic.

As I say I'm a bit out of my element trying to figure out religion, politics and culture, at least with regard to academic discourse about them. So yesterday Keguro comes to my aid in a post by introducing me to the concept of metaphoricity. Keguro by way of explanation of the term offers: Metaphoricity pits allegiance against attachment. Googling metaphoricity, it's evident that the concept is not so simple that I'll grasp it quickly.

I wrote in my last post a little about Walter Wink and his studies of redemptive violence. The fact of the matter is that I haven't read any of his books. Nor have I read any books by Rene Girard whose ideas about violence and religion are very influential. Both Wink and Girard's ideas seem quite important to developing the idea that Pentecostalism is not inherently a vehicle for reactionary right politics. But it seems that myth and metaphor have to be drawn out a bit more plainly before that.

Myths in one sense are stories which help to unfold our worldviews. Worldviews are built from interlocking systems of metaphors; metaphors which we're often quite unconscious about, at least unconscious about how they shape our perceptions of the world. Toddlers quickly appreciate the power of profanity, but are taught not to use them. So they learn to cordon them off. As a child the story Little Black Sambo was in the house. As I child I think Sambo's blackness didn't seem particularly important. The story was loved because it told how a child like me conquered fear and ruled the day. Yet the pictures were noticed of course and the meanings of those pictures cordoned off much as those magic profane words I'd learned were. Some of the meaning of the word metaphoricity it seems to me has to do with being unconscious about this cordoning off, so that words and stereotypes are thought, consciously, to be not so different from ordinary words and concepts.

Sambo as a racial slur has a history worth considering. Hardly any Americans identify as racists, but we are very often blind to our own prejudice. Exploring online the Jim Crow Museum at Ferris State University is eye-opening. The Jim Crow Museum also has a YouTube Channel which is a good entry point for relevant videos.

In the center of the photo is a black man with a Bible, that's William J. Seymour. Seymour. He guided a revival on Azusa street in Los Angeles in 1906. Many trace the birth of the Pentecostal movement to the Azusa Street Revival. The story is well known among Pentecostals. While there are many strands in the American Evangelical movement which are overtly racist, at its birth Pentecostalism has believed that the out pouring of the Spirit among brown, white and black was evidence of the authenticity of the event. However prejudiced an individual person within the Pentecostal movement might be, the story of Azusa Street Revival stands in opposition to their prejudice.

If metaphoricity is important by virtue of our somehow loosing track of the conscious awareness that “this” is a metaphor, it is also noteworthy that our systems of metaphors we live by are interlocking, but in a loose enough way to allow for contradictions. The story of a universal revelation of the Spirit at the foundation of the Pentecostal Movement doesn't prevent racist and sexist views, but does provide an opening for discussion and conscious examination.

It's a mistake to think Evangelical Christians are unstudied. I've often marveled at how Christians quote the Bible from memory. But Bible study is far more in depth than just memorizing the text. Much is made of the ways that the Internet is used by fundamentalist Muslims, but Christians are sophisticated users of the new Web tools too. I'm always impressed surfing around by the use of the Internet by religious groups. There's the extraordinary collective effort, there are millions of Evangelical Christian Web sites. Christians are also quick studies when it comes to networking. But there is also the content. On one hand are quaint constructions, such as “that which we percieveth,” and on the other competent usage of the jargon of philosophy.

Back in the mid 1980's I was studying for my degree in elementary education. Quite a lot of the work was in composing behavioral objectives for lessons. The idea is to have learning objectives which can be measured and are appropriate and relevant. In reading instruction there are hundred, perhaps thousands, of objectives. The Teacher's Edition of reading textbooks are fat, because they contain a map of sorts of objectives; phonics and decoding skills; dictionary and study skills, etc. etc. All these objectives are keyed to the text the children read. It can get tedious trying to imagine ways to relate these objectives to the stories children read and to their own experience of school.

On the nightly news around that time I saw video of a woman speaking in front of a school board about their decision to purchase a new set of reading texts in her school district. She demanded:

I will not have my children forced to read books written by homosexual deconstructionists!

I was flabbergasted partly from having spent quite a lot of my time comparing various reading textbooks I found it hard to imagine how any of the series could be deemed to have objectionable content. If anything to object to they seemed all too safe. Secondly literary theory and deconstruction seemed so esoteric, I wondered when the Bible ladies had the time for it.

Mary Catherine Bateson reflects on mother metaphors for Earth in an essay an encourages us to reflect on the metaphors we employ. In the essay she uses complaints about reading texts as an example:

Not long ago, in 1988, a group of parents in Tennessee brought a lawsuit protesting that their children were being taught the religion of "secular humanism" in the schools, and objecting to the use of fantasy and mythology in education. A picture from a reading primer that showed a little boy and a little girl sitting at a kitchen table, with the little boy putting a piece of bread into a toaster, was cited as undermining traditional concepts of the family. This may seem extreme, yet these parents were right in their understanding of how people think and learn. Not only does such a picture undermine traditional concepts of the family but it undermines traditional concepts of God, for male dominance over females has long provided a model for the relationship between God and humankind. They would also be right to resist the metaphor of the dryad, along with any other suggestion of sacred presence immanent in the natural world, as undermining the idea of God as transcendent, ruling from outside and above.

Family systems, the organization of institutions, the way we run our country, the way we respond to other cultures and races, and the uses of political and military power--all these things are based on interlocking sets of metaphors. Our many relationships are isomorphic: they have the same form. There is a pattern that connects, and it is a pattern of dominance and exploitation, taught again and again in the most ordinary human arrangements. That pattern is expressed in the fierce and ultimately self-destructive attack on this planet that we cannot rule because we are a part of it.

Sarah Palin's candidacy provides an opportunity for Americans to reflect not only on sexism, racism, but on the system of metaphors which sustain them. Palin's religiosity brings forward myths which can help us to see our worldviews more clearly and to approach contradictions we've left unexamined.

Political Metaphor

That illustration has little to do with anything I'm about to write. It's a Wordle of my Delicious tags. Wordle is a cool toy, and surely this tag cloud says something about me, I'm just not sure what.

As I write the TV is quiet in the background, tuned to the Republican National Convention. My Dad is upstairs watching, and quiet as it is, I wince occasionally. As the speakers are quick to point out the issue is not so much Democrats and Republicans but different ways of imagining ourselves. George Lakoff is a cognitive scientist with a theory about how we make sense of the world through metaphors. Lakoff has much more to say about metaphors beyond politics, but he's well known for talking about metaphors in the American political context.

Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust is a compact, yet thorough exposition of his ideas on the subject. Lakoff contends that whether liberal or conservative Americans view the nation in terms of a family metaphor. Lakoff contrasts a conservative conception of this metaphor as "a strict father" model against the liberal "nurturant parent" model. In popular press this way of looking at American politics is rendered as "The daddy party and the mommy party." In the last presidential election cycle Frances Moore Lappe wrote an essay urging progressives to be wary of this framing. I think France Moore Lappe is brilliant and her points about the downsides of the liberal model within the nation as a family metaphor quite sound. But I'm less persuaded that we can quickly change the metaphors we live by; that, it seems to me, is a slow process.

The religious controversies within Christianity often revolve around the place of women in society. In my last post I pointed out that Mike Davis observes the dominance of women in the Pentecostal movement in the developing world. Indeed, the prominence of women within the movement here in the USA is a source of much dispute with other streams in the Evangelical movement. Many in the movement believe that women are prohibited from exercising authority over men in the Church. Actually this is the pervasive doctrine among most Christian denominations, not just the Evangelical movement.

From my agnostic perspective, it seems to me that Christian's often raise the argument of "Biblical orthodoxy" when in fact the orthodoxy they actually refer conforms to their world view which is rooted in sets of interlocking ideas having little to do with the Bible. So I hardly predict that the theological disputes between Evangelicals will impair Sarah Palin's appeal to Evangelical Christian voters.

The funny thing about thinking in metaphors is how impossible or unlikely different metaphors used by others seem. Our metaphors point what particulars out of the flux of events to attend. The old parable The Blind Men and the Elephant captures well how metaphors shape our views:

"When the blind men had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said to each, 'Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?'

"Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, 'Sire, an elephant is like a pot.' And the men who had observed the ear replied, 'An elephant is like a winnowing basket.' Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.

People are aware of the hazard and the importance of multiple views, even if we fail to be cautious. And we are able to hold multiple contradictory views at the same time. So while our world views are sets of interlocking the fit is often quite loose.

Gender roles changed with the rapid industrialization of the Industrial Revolution. Among upper and middle class women in Great Britain and the USA a separation of spheres which historian Barbara Welter called The Cult of True Womanhood developed in response to the Industrial Revolution. And what we tend to think of as Victorian values in the USA are closely related to this development. Welter wrote:

The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forbears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one cast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women's magazines, gift annuals, and religious literature of the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same - a true woman was a true woman, wherever she was found. If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues that made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as the enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic. It was the fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenth-century American woman had - to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand.

The four virtues of women in this construction are: Piety, Purity, Submission, and Domesticity.

In many ways the entry of so many women into the industrial labor force has upended this conception of womanhood. Sarah Palin's nasty speech accepting her nomination as vice presidential candidate highlighted the contradiction between the her reactionary politics and her ambition. Even her masterful rhetoric portraying John McCain as a strict father worthy of authority highlights it. McCain has had four recurrences of his cancer, his health is an issue. She cannot simply run as a help-mate, but must also show herself capable of the presidency.

The contradiction is not one felt only by women and men with conservative politics, it's a contradiction which dogs liberal women and men too. There is so much great writing on the about sexism and Feminism, that it's daunting to engage in the subject. I'm sure I'll screw up as I try. Yet these issues, often discussed in the press as "the culture wars" are too important not to address and to try for better understandings. So I prattle on in my next post.